Industry News

Google Ads has this feature for call us extensions to scan to call, where Google shows you a QR code on the screen that you can scan from your phone to call. Now Google is testing to send this number to your phone via text or email.

It is now four weeks and one day since the Google March 2024 core update started rolling out, 29 days since it started and yes, it is not done rolling out yet. Google's Danny Sullivan and John Mueller both confirmed that yesterday, even though Google's search status dashboard says the same thing.

Microsoft announced a number of new Microsoft Advertising features, including that maximize conversion value is now available for search campaigns; previously, it was only available for shopping search campaigns. Also, Microsoft announced Microsoft Click ID, AI image cropping, and the hotel center deprecation date.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

I posted the big Google Webmaster Report for April...

After a relatively slow Google webmaster report last month, this month was the extreme opposite...

Reddit moderators in the SEO channel continue to remove the responses that Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, is posting in response to some SEO and Google Search-related questions. It is somewhat comical to see this, because you'd think any forum would want an official Google representative to reply to their users questions.

Google seems to be testing showing a special cruise search results pack. The pack shows you a date selector, cruise line, sail from location and sail to location.

Google seems to be testing a "comments" button in the Google Discover and Google Search interface. It might be Google testing replacing the notes button for search notes with comments, to see if it gets more engagement.

Gary Illyes from Google posted on LinkedIn that his mission this year is to "figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire." He added that Googlebot should "be more intelligent about caching and internal cache sharing among user agents, and we should have fewer bytes on wire."

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...